When Our Senses Overwhelm Us

"The canine sense of smell and his repertoire of scents is, after all, at least hundreds of times and perhaps more than a million times more acute and more expansive than mine." Randy Kidd, DMV, PhD

It is said that for us, our sense of smell is most closely tied to memory, but our sense of vision tends to take priority over the other senses. I have read that when we lose our vision, our sense of hearing becomes more acute, for example.

When teaching phlebotomy skills to nurses not used to performing that task (blood drawing for labs), they would blindly run their fingers up and down the patients arm in a mild panic if they couldn't see the vein with their eyes. I would encourage them to take a deep breathe and close their eyes, let their fingers begin to work without the distraction of the eyes.

The inspiration for this post are my little furry critters over there on the left sidebar. For a few months now the canines and the felines have been working on detente with the door to the basement stairs serving as the Iron Curtain and the work room downstairs (where the dogs are fed) as West Berlin. (now that I have beaten THAT metaphor to death...)

Frankie, my Welsh terrier, most of all has yet to give up on full investigation of the kittens. He will not let an opportunity pass to sniff their butts, nip at their rumps, and try to get them to play. Needless to say the kittens are not amused. Lola will only get into the fray if Frankie is there already stirring the pot--otherwise she pretty much leaves well enough alone. However, when she is the first dog to venture into cat space she will scout out the terrain to see where those alien beasts are lurking.

The fable in all this is that often times with their sense of smell in overload they will run right past the cats while searching for them - literally within inches of them. True the cats are "hiding" - akin to a 200 pound man hiding behind a lamppost. The entire basement now must be this massive olfactory zone of tempting feline scent. In their excitement, the dogs run around, "KITTY! KITTY! I SMELL KITTY! MUST FIND KITTY!" They are lead by their awesome sense of smell and blinded as a result.

It has me thinking about ways in which we too zip right past the answers we are looking for because we have allowed the dominant way of perceiving a situation to take control.

A very common example of this for me would be "presumed heterosexuality." Folks who are not in tune to the full spectrum of human sexuality - "Well, I don't mind homosexuals I suppose, as long as they stay down there in the big cities...it's not like we have any of their sort HERE..." -- only see their world through a heterosexual lens.

I don't mean to limit this concept to the manner in which we deal in stereotypes. I believe it is much bigger than that. The above was just a simple example to make my point. I believe what I am getting at has to do with breaking out of our respective paradigms.

I love to smash paradigms. I love to ask - "But WHY do we have to do it that way?" When I first switched to day shift on the ortho/neuro/peds floor at the hospital many years ago, I drove the Old Doll nurses crazy. I know this because my manager told me so at my 90 day evaluation. She told me that she likes that I think outside the box, but that the other nurses just don't get me. For example, the established routine was that all the bathes must be completed by 10AM. They would kill themselves some days to make this happen. I chose not to worry about this though - we had the entire 8 hour day shift to achieve this goal. It made the girls crazy.

This is not to say that, like my little canine friends, I don't let my sense of smell get the better of me and rush right past the cats that I know must be there. I do my best. I try to remember to be aware of this tendency. When I do, I close my eyes and let the other senses guide me.

Peace.